How Goldie Hawn Met Amy Schumer

Why did it take one of America's greatest kooks, Goldie Hawn, she of Laugh-In and Private Benjamin mega-fame, 15 years to stage a comeback? She was loving life (and Kurt Russell). And she hadn't met Amy Schumer yet.

Two things catch my eye in Goldie Hawn's bathroom. The first is a bronze lamp in the shape of a cat wearing a bow tie. It's perched in the corner of the wash basin. The second is a baroque painting depicting a child angel sensually smooching a naked teenage boy, which hangs on the wall by the toilet. The rest of the bathroom is standardly rich-looking—marble and gold and warmly lit, with a couple Goldie Hawn-y accents to remind you that America's favorite kook, the lady who stood on a chair in a white pantsuit belting out “You Don't Own Me” in The First Wives Club and pranced around an apartment in nothing but her scanty undies for much of Butterflies Are Free, pees in this place.

I'm well acquainted with Goldie Hawn's bathroom because the first question I have to ask the 71-year-old icon is “Can I use your bathroom?” This is partly my fault: I drank too much seltzer on the drive over. It's also partly Goldie's fault. She was filming a promo for Snatched—a mother-daughter comedy in which Hawn and Amy Schumer get kidnapped on a trip to Ecuador—and she's an hour late to our get-together. When Goldie's car finally pulls up, everything springs into action, like a director just yelled “Cut!” Assistants scatter out of a black SUV and jog into the house; men lift barstools out of a truck. Turns out Goldie and “longtime love” Kurt Russell only just moved into this place. “Place” might be missing a letter—it's a palace, plucked from Tuscany, pumped with steroids, and plopped onto a grassy plot in Pacific Palisades. Goldie's decorating the whole thing herself.

“It's still coming together,” she says apologetically, lamenting the lack of curtains. But there are some things set up: books on the shelves, a decorative Buddha, a framed photo of Goldie and daughter Kate Hudson in a laughing embrace. There are more than a few exotic-animal rugs on the hardwood floor, too. “This one is so great,” she says, stretching her feet into the depths of the very large, very shaggy white-haired rug of mysterious animal origins (direwolf?) beneath us. “But there's the dog situation, you know? I don't want the dogs to go, Oh, a rug…oh, an animal…oh, it smells good.” Here Goldie wiggles her fingers in the air, I believe to communicate the image of a dog urinating.

“This would be so nice for when your feet get cold.” I say.

“My feet don't get cold,” she says. “But—” She looks up, trying to remember. “When was it? My hands got cold recently. When did my hands get cold? I'm trying to think.... Oh, it was in Vancouver the day before yesterday!” She slaps her thigh and laughs.

You know the laugh, right? It's sweet like a giggle, but with the throatiness of a cackle. Her whole mouth opens wide and her body falls forward. It's the laugh that basically made her career as a 23-year-old on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, when she won hearts not through comic genius, exactly, but from routinely breaking character and erupting into fits of giggles; she was apparently born part rainbow.

A partial list of what currently makes Goldie Hawn happy: meditation at dusk, riding bikes, “having a joyous connection with the molecules in the air,” just being, making love to Kurt Russell, “looking at plants,” and making movies. Even though she hasn't done the last one in a little while—okay, 15 years. “If I had gotten something that's just a bang-up character and a great role, it doesn't matter how big it is,” she says, but none really came. Not until she was cold-pitched by a young admirer at baggage claim at LAX.

“She came up and said, ‘I'm Amy Schumer and, you know, I'm a big fan. I just wanted to say I've written a movie and I'd love you to be in it.’ ” Snatched begins with Schumer and Hawn bickering over sunscreen and ends with them traipsing through an Ecuadorian jungle and accidentally killing a bunch of South American teenagers. It feels like the kind of movie they stopped making when Goldie Hawn stopped starring in movies. All her biggest hits—Overboard, Private Benjamin, Protocol—seem to follow the equation: Goldie Hawn + Crazy Situation = Pure Delight. Which is probably why Schumer was hell-bent on getting Hawn to play her mother. But at baggage claim, Goldie had no idea who this person was. “So I said: ‘Well, okay, sweetie. Let's see.’ ”

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